Legal
Terms & Conditions
Effective
A free service that stores nothing can afford to keep its terms short. These are written to be read, not to be survived.
The short version: use it for anything lawful, do not attack it or use it to hurt anyone, and understand that clipboards are designed to disappear. It is free and provided as is, so please do not make it the only copy of something you cannot lose.
1Agreeing to these terms
By using Online Clipboards you accept these terms and the Privacy Policy, which forms part of them. There is no signup, so opening a clipboard is the acceptance. If you do not agree with something here, the remedy is simple and immediate: do not use the service. If you are using it on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are allowed to accept these terms for it.
2What the service is
Online Clipboards is a live relay between two devices. Your browser encrypts what you send, we pass the encrypted result to the other device, and the clipboard deletes itself on the timer you chose — 10 minutes, 1 hour, 24 hours or 7 days — or on first read, if you asked for that. Files are relayed in encrypted chunks and never written to our disk, up to 100MB per file.
It is not a storage product, a backup, a file host, a CDN or a messaging platform, and it should not be relied on as any of those. It is free, with no paid tier and no advertising.
3No account, and what that costs you
There is no account, no password and no recovery flow, and that is the design rather than an omission. The consequence is worth being blunt about: the link is the credential. Anyone who has the whole link can read that clipboard until it expires, and if you lose the link nobody can recover it for you — not you, and not us, because the key was never on our side to begin with. Treat a clipboard link the way you would treat the contents of the clipboard itself.
4Your content stays yours
Whatever you send through a clipboard remains yours. We claim no ownership of it and no licence to use it, which is straightforward to honour given that it arrives encrypted and we could not read, index or reuse it if we wanted to. We ask for no rights beyond relaying the bytes to the device you paired with, and holding them only until the clipboard expires.
You are responsible for what you put through it, and you confirm you have the right to send it.
5Acceptable use
Encryption is not permission. You may not use this service to:
- Transmit anything unlawful where you are or where the service runs — including material that sexually exploits children, incites violence, or infringes someone else’s copyright or trade secrets.
- Distribute malware, or use a clipboard as part of phishing, fraud, harassment or the exposure of someone’s private information without their consent.
- Attack the service or the people using it: probing for vulnerabilities beyond what responsible disclosure covers, attempting to join clipboards that are not yours, flooding it, or working around rate limits.
- Run it as infrastructure: automated or bulk clipboard creation, scraping, using it as a backend for another product, or reselling access to it. Ordinary human use is what the capacity is sized for.
6Custom clipboard names
If you give a clipboard a memorable name, that name is temporary and shared: it belongs to nobody, it is released when the clipboard expires, and someone else may use it afterwards. Names that impersonate this service, imply an official status, infringe a trademark, or are chosen to abuse or mislead are not allowed and may be removed without notice. Note also that a memorable name is far easier to guess than a random one — it is a convenience, never a protection.
7Availability, and the absence of a promise
There is no uptime commitment and no service level agreement. We may change, suspend, rate limit or discontinue any part of the service, at any time, without notice. Clipboards live in memory, so a restart or a deploy ends every clipboard open at that moment — expected behaviour for an ephemeral product, and one more reason not to let a clipboard be the only copy of anything.
A transfer also needs both devices connected at the same time. That is the price of storing nothing.
8Enforcement and what we can actually do
We may block traffic, refuse or remove a name, or cut off access where we reasonably believe these terms are being broken or the service is being attacked. Because there are no accounts, enforcement is necessarily blunt.
It is also genuinely limited, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: we cannot read clipboard contents, so we cannot review, moderate or remove them on request. If you report abusive content we can act on what is visible to us — a name, a pattern of traffic — but the content itself is beyond our reach by design, and in any case deletes itself within days at most. Reports still help, and unlawful material should also be reported to the appropriate authority.
9No warranty
The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that a message or file will arrive. We describe the encryption carefully and honestly on the security page, limits included, but no software can be warranted secure against every possible attack, and we do not warrant it here.
This disclaimer applies only as far as the law applying to you allows. Several countries give consumers statutory guarantees that a supplier cannot disclaim, and where you have those, you keep them in full — see section 12.
10Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost data or content that failed to arrive, expired, or was read by someone who obtained your link. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid to use it, which is zero.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, and where that is so, these limits apply only as far as that jurisdiction permits. Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded under the law applying to you — including the mandatory consumer rights preserved in section 12.
11Indemnity
If your use of the service, or something you send through it, leads to a claim against us by someone else, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. This does not apply to claims arising from our own wrongdoing.
12Governing law
Online Clipboards is operated from India, so these terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India are where a dispute about them would ordinarily be heard.
That settles which rules apply between us on the questions the law leaves to us to agree. It is not a claim that Indian law displaces the law where you live, and we are not asking you to give up anything your own country does not let you give up.
Your local rights are expressly preserved
If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of the country you live in. Nothing in this clause, or anywhere else in these terms, operates to:
- exclude or limit any mandatory consumer-protection right available to you — statutory guarantees, remedies for a service not supplied with reasonable care, protection against unfair contract terms, and any right a local court would refuse to let us contract out of;
- reduce your privacy and data-protection rights under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the CCPA and CPRA, the DPDP Act or any equivalent law that applies to you. Those are governed by the Privacy Policy and by the law giving them to you, not by this clause;
- waive any other non-waivable statutory right, or remove a remedy that the law applying to you says must stay available;
- prevent you from bringing proceedings in the courts of your own country, where the law there entitles you to do so.
Where the law of your country conflicts with something in these terms and that law cannot be contracted out of, that law prevails to the extent of the conflict. The rest of these terms continue to apply around it.
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, whether generally or only where you live, that part is treated as removed for that purpose and the rest stays in force.
13Changes to these terms
We may update these terms, and the effective date at the top changes when we do. Continuing to use the service after a change means accepting the revised terms. There is no mailing list to announce it on, because we have no way to contact you.
14Contact
Online Clipboards, operating from India. Questions about these terms, abuse reports and legal notices all go to hello@onlineclipboards.com, or via the contact page.